It was carried thence into Carthage, and from that great Phoenician city was copied in America and became the great document known as the United States Constitution, under which Gibran lived to write in freedom for both Arabic and English readers. This small piece of land, the birthplace of Gibran, was the birthplace of Western Civilization and constitutional government, and Gibran was one of its blessed sons and the latest contribution to this great United States of America.

1.   See the chapters on Gelgamish, Eshtar and Tamuz in the author’s book One White Race.

2.   See chapter on Baal in the book, One White Race.

4. WORDS OF CAUTION

Lebanon or Syria?

Gibran is known as the man from Lebanon, but he wrote My Country Syria. This discrepancy creates a most vexing problem for anyone writing about the Middle East.

As guideposts we offer the following:

As rivers bring sediment into the sea, new areas of land are created and new cities follow the land; in that case one city is older than another. In the Middle East the bottom of the ocean rose, carrying its petrified fish to the summit of a mountain. All the land east of the Mediterranean was created at the same time; no one section of it is older than another.

Man roamed the land as a hunter in the Middle East and North Africa for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years. During this period of hunting there were no political subdivisions and man needed no passport to migrate.1 Europe was covered with snow until twenty-five thousand years ago. Hence it was not conducive to human habitation; a few handy savages lived in caves until the glacier receded. Then man changed his residence from a cave to a sur, or enclosure, and became a city dweller; this sur became the name of a city on the seashore known to the West as Tyre. This city, Sur (Tyre), and its goddess Suria, which is still worshiped in India, gave its name to the whole area east of the Mediterranean. As Sur was latinized into Tyre, Suria was latinized into Syria and included the mountains of Lebanon.

Those city dwellers developed a philosophy of the existence of the soul, its immortality and resurrection, along with the premise that the soul needed help or guidance in order that it might reach paradise (heaven). This idea was adopted by St. Augustine. Those city dwellers of Sur or Tyre, traveled with their philosophy to Egypt, Babylonia, North Africa and Europe; they conquered the seas, colonized and founded the great cities of Europe, including London. They were nicknamed the Phoenicians or “the believers in immortality.”

In the caves men developed the idea of fighting in groups to overcome the mighty animals; in the city they fought in groups to destroy each other.

The cave dwellers grouped together to protect a cave or a spring of water; the Suri or city dwellers built a sur to protect a city and an army to protect a country. Even now every country keeps an army.

What has all this to do with the nationality of Gibran?

It affects us in this respect: wars create new boundaries, new administrations and new philosophies of government. Hence the administrative divisions of Gibran’s country during the Roman period varied greatly at different times. The Roman Emperor, Hadrian, divided it into three provinces: Syria, Syria-Phoenicia and Syria-Palestine. Gibran was born in Syria-Phoenicia; Christ was born in Syria-Palestine.

One historian writing about the birth of Christ has said: “It did not appear that one born in the obscurity of a Syrian provincial village would be able to give a new date to history and change the religious belief of mankind.”

After the Romans came the Arabs, after the Arabs came the Turks, after the Turks came the French and the English. None of the armies of these invaders ever assaulted the mountains because they were treacherous, impregnable and not worth the cost. These mountains were like a besieged city; the armies would occupy the plains on the east and the cities along the seashore, and after a period of time the mountaineers would come down to join each new invader, bargaining but reserving for themselves certain rights and privileges.

When the Arabs conquered that part of the world from India to Spain and converted it to Islam, the mountaineers, Gibran’s ancestors, were able to preserve their Christian religion, a tiny island of Christians in an ocean of Islam.

When Turkey overran the country, it divided Syria into districts (Wilayah), naming for each one a governor with the title of Pasha. The people during the Turkish rule of four hundred years, refused to be assimilated by their conquerors. Hence the country of Gibran remained its Achilles’ heel, and its numerous revolutions were supported by one European country or another until 1860, when a civil war broke out. England sent her fleet and France disembarked on Lebanese soil an army of six thousand men. After the landing of these armies, a special committee composed of diplomatic representatives of France, England, Russia and Austria convened in Beirut with the First Minister of Turkey. The outcome was the conferring upon Lebanon of an internal autonomy guaranteed by these European powers. The Sultan was to appoint a Christian governor for Lebanon and the European powers were to approve the appointment. This autonomous area included neither the plains of Bekaa on the east nor the cities along the seashores, nor even Beirut, which is now the capital of Lebanon.

Therefore, the people who came to America from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were classified as Syrian nationals regardless of whether they came from Damascus or from the mountains by the cedars.

After the First World War Turkey was ousted and France received from the League of Nations a mandate over Syria and Lebanon, while England took over Palestine. Even then, people arriving in America were listed as Syrian nationals.

During the Second World War, Lebanon and Syria overthrew the French mandate and became separate, independent countries with full representation in the United Nations.

Therefore the words in Gibran’s book My Countrymen the Syrians include both the Syrians and the Lebanese.

Youth

“During the days of my youth I wrote enough prose and poetry to fill many volumes, but I did not, and shall not, commit the crime of having them published.”

Thus wrote Gibran to a friend. However, the admirers of Gibran are publishing anything and everything they can find.